In a courtroom in the town of Kaluga, south-west of Moscow, later this month, a Russian academic and security affairs specialist will stand trial for espionage. Igor Sutyagin, 35, who collates and analyses information from Russian newspapers and periodicals for the prestigious US-Canada Institute in Moscow, is accused of passing state secrets to the old cold war enemy.

Human rights activists denounce the case as the latest evidence of the "spy-mania" gripping Russia under President Vladimir Putin, and point to a series of alarming signals suggesting that the secret police are clawing back power and influence after a decade of disgrace and demoralisation.

"There's a new fear. It's a new situation," a former KGB general now in banking said. "There's a sense of the KGB's return. For 10 years those guys were sitting around silent. Now they see their chance."

Under Mr Putin, who served in the KGB for 16 years, former KGB officers and military men are playing a bigger role in politics than at any time since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Sergei Ivanov, a career KGB officer, heads Mr Putin's security council and is increasingly seen as the unofficial and unelected vice-president. A former KGB colleague, Viktor Ivanov, runs the Kremlin personnel department. Nikolai Patrushev, another former colleague of Mr Putin's and head of the KGB's main successor, the FSB, has just been put in charge of the war in Chechnya.

"It's unprecedented that the army and the interior ministry troops are put under the secret police. That's a new direction for Russia," Sergei Grigoryants, a leading human rights activist and head of the Glasnost Foundation, said.

Outsiders Of 18 new regional governors elected in the 13 months since Mr Putin became president, four are army or navy officers. Of the seven presidential envoys Mr Putin has appointed to run "super-regions", five are army or ex-KGB officers.

"They're incompetent," the ex-KGB general said. "They don't know economics, they can't pay salaries, and they're outsiders in the regions they're supposed to be running."

Last week the liberals' leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, said that Mr Putin was building a police state. The former prime minister and fellow liberal Yegor Gaidar told a conference in Washington that the jury was still out on whether Mr Putin's government was committed to democracy. He noted "a very serious increase of the role of the secret service", and "selective pressure" on the free media. "All this shows that the Russian leadership at least is not very decided on the issue of democracy being necessary."

The Sutyagin case follows the sentencing in December of Edmund Pope, a retired US naval officer, to 20 years for spying. Mr Pope was the first American to be sentenced for espionage in Russia for 40 years, though Mr Putin promptly displayed magnanimity and pardoned him.

Pollution That case was preceded by the high-profile trials of environmentalists and ex-military whistleblowers charged with treason for publicising nuclear pollution in Russia's far north and far east. The point, critics say, is to intimidate the independent-minded and discourage opposition.

For example, Mr Sutyagin's employer, the US-Canada Institute, is highly influential with the Moscow foreign policy elite, while being seen as liberal and pro-western.

"The effect of putting Sutyagin on trial is to create a climate of fear," said Valery Borshev, who runs the human rights section of the parliamentary legislation committee. "Yet again, the hunt is on for enemies of the state."

The arrests and trials have prompted a tug-of-war between the security services on the one hand, and civil organisations and the media. Human rights groups have just held the biggest ever conference of its type in Moscow in response to the encroachment on civil liberties. That the conference took place at all is a measure of how Russia's fledgling civil society is developing, indicating resistance to the Kremlin and suggesting that Mr Putin's authoritarian instincts are less than total.

But for the past year reports have been circulating in Moscow that the president is bent on restoring the all-powerful KGB under a new name, and making it answerable to himself. It is thought, however, that he wants it to exercise a selective control, recognising that he cannot restore the sweeping surveillance of the Soviet era.

After the abortive KGB-led putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, President Boris Yeltsin set about destroying the KGB. He dissolved its huge bureaucracy and broke down its 16 directorates into five separate agencies, to prevent power being concentrated.

Many of the most able secret policemen left to make money in the new private sector or to run the burgeoning private armies and security services of the big banks and companies. The FSB went through eight chiefs in as many years.

But Mr Putin has ended that disarray and rehabilitated the KGB as the embodiment of the ascetic, incorruptible public service. The Kremlin spin doctors have been assiduously cultivating the image of the secret policeman as modern hero.

In December secret policemen spent the evening carousing with Mr Putin, not at their Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow but in the Kremlin, to celebrate the foundation in December 1917 of the Cheka, the Bolshevik forerunner of the KGB which developed into the key instrument of the Great Terror.

"The history of the Lubyanka in the last century is our history," Mr Patrushev declared. "We should retain and increase everything in that history which worked for the benefit of Russia."

Such remarks chill democrats. Mr Borshev said that during the Yeltsin years he, and various non-governmental organisations, had a dialogue with the Kremlin and were consulted by the security council.

"That's all gone now," he said. "They don't want contact with public bodies. It's closed analysis, closed decisions and closed actions. There's no information and no control. The problem is that the public is now receptive - it is looking to the secret police to solve its problems - while the FSB takes that as a licence to renew the old KGB methods."

Mr Grigoryants said a Russian diplomat had told him that the FSB had installed a "telephone trust-line" at the foreign ministry for staff to denounce colleagues. "They're promised anonymity." Ministry staff had been told to meet foreigners only in pairs, one to keep an eye on the other.

Mr Grigoryants was at a meeting in Brussels with European officials and lobbyists last month to plan a Paris conference. Out of courtesy, he said, he had informed the Russian embassy about the meeting. "Two Russian diplomats showed up. They were very unconstructive and tried to disrupt the meeting."

In an rare interview with a Moscow newspaper in December, Sergei Lebedev, the foreign intelligence chief, waxed sentimental about spies and secret police.

"Being an agent means being reliable," he said. "It means dedication to the homeland, to comrades, it means being noble."